Shooting birds... using a camera of course

Something I haven't done in few years was to shoot some pictures of birds... With very little macro life around after the brutal winter we had, I was wondering about my options of shooting wild life. That's when my colleague Duane asked whether I would like to join and go out to shoot some wildlife... 

So took off with my Canon 70-300mm telephoto lens to take some shots of birds late afternoon when the sun is around the golden hour (or 2 hours in this case). With natural lighting nailed down, the rest was up to patience, camera settings and the ability to predict where they ll show up and where they ll go. In this article, I will present some of the results and talk a bit about what went right/wrong + the objective of the setup.

Will start off with some shots of Geese... (not a bird I am fond of)... But the backlit goslings made the shot more dramatic with their colorful fur.

Here s a shot of two of them at the river banks... The synchronized motion of them is whats interesting in the shot. However, the focus seems a little off in this one (noticed after the fact).

They also makes it dramatic when they bathe or play with water...

Now the two shots below are of birds when they were standing relatively still...  What makes them work for me in the light green (matching) colors introduced by the new leaves in the first one and the framing of the head using the two branches in the second one.

The one below was also of a busy little bird..  But was a situation where I had to rely on manual focus since the back-lighting of the bird kept on throwing off the camera's auto-focus (making the lens hunt for focus). But I wanted to capture this guy at any cost due to its lovely colored feathers which were glowing in the sun.

Here s how I took this one... The bird was flying from one branch to the other constantly.. So I wanted to catch it during this short flight. The movement was so fast that there was no possibility of catching this without some premeditation. So once it settled on a branch, I manually focused and waited for it to move to snap away. This one is not perfectly in focus... However, if I had more time to spend trying this, the technique was bound to return results.

Here s a case where luck comes into play.  This bird came gliding in with light only hitting a small cross section... Though I was able to track it nicely.. it was dark against the background... Then it suddenly made this u turn and for a split second, its whole body was glowing in the sun.... Here the result.

Not an expert on wildlife work though.. so would love to hear your thoughts about this topic. Comment below or send an e-mail to continue this discussion.

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Thank you.
Akila.